“Don’t taze me, bro!”
English language aesthete Grammar Girl addressed word creation in her most recent podcast, “Verbification of a Noun”, apropos of our class discussion last week in which we discussed the transformation of a noun to a verb. “Can it be done?” asked one of Grammar Girl’s listeners. “Yes, it can”, she answered, but in cautious, warning tones. Of course, Grammar Girl would never let out that language really isn’t the ”pure” monolith she and other grammar mavens preach and want the genral public to believe.
What Grammar Girl was talking about is a morphological process of derving new words by affixing bound and even free morphemes (words and parts of words like prefixes and suffixes) to existing words, thereby changing their category (part of speech). She discussed the “verbification” of the noun ”TASER” (itself and acronym for Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle) to the verb “taze”. We derive new words in this manner. And you know what? It’s okay to do, and you’d do well to remember it the next time you get Eiffel Towered.
And there’s even more action on the morphology front: The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is now less 16,000 hyphenated words, that is the hyphens have been dropped from many compounds. The story, “A Farewell to Hyphens”, suggests that this change indicates a move toward American spelling standards. How will usage purists react to this?
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“Of course, Grammar Girl would never let out that language really isn’t the ”pure” monolith she and other grammar mavens they preach and want the genral public to believe.”
There is a grammatical error in that sentence, Mr. Girard. There should be no “they” in the part of the sentence that says “she and other grammar mavens they preach”.
Actually, it was a typo. And editing errors really aren’t grammatical errors. Good try though.
Thanks for the correction, Marie.
Snap!